Students Need An Audience If We Expect Them To Learn How To Write

Jacob
Lewis is the co-founder and CEO of Figment, an online
community for teens and young adults to create, discover,
and share new reading and writing.

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Of all the school assignments whose usefulness you could complain
about—“Do I really need to memorize all the battles of the Civil
War?” “When am I ever going to need to know what an isosceles
triangle is?!”—the book report seems the most disconnected from
the real world. A dry recitation of plot points, seemingly
written for the sole purpose of being graded.

This is not communication at its finest. The only person you
write a book report for is your teacher: the same teacher who’s
read hundreds of other reports on To Kill a Mockingbird and is
well aware that Atticus Finch is a brave lawyer and that Boo
Radley is a scary old recluse, but who needs to be able to check
off that you know it, too.

Writing, however, is meant to be read. That’s its reason for
being. Even as we move from a world of
books and paper to a world of screens and social networks, text
is the bedrock of human communication. Through writing, we
articulate ideas, arguments, and ourselves—and we determine how
to articulate these concepts by considering our audience and the
impact we hope to have on them.

There are plenty of finance folk and engineering eggheads who use
the skills they learned in school on a daily basis, employing
complex algorithms and equations as a matter of course. And yet
we still don’t teach writing as a usable skill, as a tool that
has value above and beyond its ability to impress a teacher. But
most of today’s work force—about two-thirds of salaried employees
in the US, according to the National Commission on Writing—have
some writing responsibility, producing technical reports, memos,
and emails. The annual cost of re-training those workers to write
well? $3.1 billion.

Good writing requires attention to form and conventions, but it
also requires an awareness of the audience at the other end.
Whether you want to inform, inspire, or amuse, writing is about
communicating. Yet we fail to impart this essential concept in
school. Too much of the written work in our English classrooms
(and history, science, and even math classrooms, for that matter)
exists in a bubble that doesn’t extend past the school’s walls.
And we’re not just talking about the dreaded book report: even
complex, thoughtful assignments are divorced from any notion of
audience. They’re written for the eyes of the teacher alone,
making them feel inauthentic and irrelevant to students.

“We really do fail our students when we don’t help them find a
way to write real stuff,” writes Louisville teacher Anne Rodier
in an essay for the National Writing Project. “[I]f what you are writing
has no possibility of reaching a real audience for real purposes,
then there will be no investment in the work.” The effects of
this disengagement are staggering. In 2007, 75% of high school
seniors scored below proficient in writing on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (considered the “nation’s
report card”). According to a recent study by the Carnegie
Corporation, nearly one-third of high school graduates are not
ready for college-level English composition classes. Our literacy
skills rank as poorly as our math skills against other
industrialized nations—meaning too many students leave school
unconfident writers and uninterested readers.

Statistics like these are depressing. But they also represent an
opportunity for real change, and we are at a point where
technology, with its promise of myriad and instantaneous
connections, can help us do a better job of making students
passionate about words and communication. I run a website called
Figment, an
online community where teens and young adults create, discover,
and share new reading and writing. In the little over a year
since we started, about 100,000 users—nearly all of them
students—have created a library of more than 225,000 pieces of
original writing, from sonnets to essays to novels. The community
not only writes copiously, but they’re also voracious readers of
each other’s writing. They offer one another feedback, advice,
and encouragement.

One of our earliest Figment users, who used to call himself a
“closet writer,” notes how having an audience opened him up:
“When I wake up in the morning and log on to Figment and see that
someone has commented on one of my stories, my heart leaps a
little bit.” Our members use technology to connect, to engage,
and to contribute to an ever-expanding library of literary work—a
digital collection four times as big as the average local
library. And since there are always real readers on the other
end—readers they want to delight, impress, and inspire—these
students know that their words don’t exist in a bubble. And
that’s what makes them writers.

The tide appears to be turning in literacy education. A large
number of schools around the country have begun to adopt a new
set of curriculum standards called the Common Core,
to help prepare students to be college- and career-ready by
emphasizing, in part, the importance of audience and purpose in
writing education. Recognizing the connection between reading and
good writing, the standards stress the value of exposing students
to a range of texts, including journalism—for just as classroom
writing assignments benefit from being authentic and relevant,
reading assignments must also engage students and feel connected
to their lives outside the classroom.

One of the ways Figment does this is by connecting young people
to a diverse group of professional writers—from their heroes in
young-adult fiction to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.
Figment users read works by these writers, ask them questions
through web chats and q-and-a’s, and apply the insights they
glean to their own pieces. By engaging with professional writing
that has a clear audience and purpose, students begin to develop
those elements in their own writing.

Every day, we’re bringing what we’ve learned at Figment into the
classroom. Educators all around the country are using the site as
a platform and community for student writing, and they’re seeing
the enormous potential it offers. The lesson of Figment is that
authenticity—having a real audience for student writing, and
presenting real writing that engages students—is the key
ingredient in making passionate readers and dedicated writers.
And that Figment’s success can inspire a new generation of
readers and writers, prepared to write stories, school papers,
and even a memo or two.